Epilogue
by gimmeabreakxD
Summary: Life has a way of making you feel invincible, like you could outrun death, until you peer under your bed and realize that yes, there are monsters down there.
1. mountaintop

**mountaintop**

Mostly he has nightmares now.

Those moonlit nights of neon signs and pulsing beats visit him often. The wild parties, the dancing, the sweaty bodies and smeared makeup, fingers tangled with hair. Heat and motion and clandestine winks.

The breathlessness of need.

Flashes of color between flailing elbows and bent knees, tanned shoulder blades exposed, heat-curled hair and expensive perfume. White teeth gleaming in the stuffy darkness pierced by strobe lights. (_greenpurplebluegreenpurpleblue_) Smoke and music, low voices murmuring in his ear, silken strands of liquid craving: Hello, handsome, lookin' for a good time?

Yes. Goddess, yes.

The groping that always followed, concealed under the cover of moving bodies: sticky palms and fingers crawling, prodding, lingering on buttons and zippers with sensuous ease. The cab ride to the apartment—_yours or mine?_—the clothes dropping to the floor—zip, swish swish—the grunts and moans and heavy breathing.

Each time with the heavy breathing.

The awkward moments spent smoking cigarettes in bed in the half-light of dawn. Ashtrays by the bedside. The radiator buzzing. Also the hung-over mornings with its furtive glances, the oh-no's and what-have-I-done's. No names exchanged. The hurried ritual of searching for discarded articles of clothing, rumpled little things, sometimes stained by Goddess knows what.

No strings attached.

No names.

Just faces, and bodies.

Moving scenes, all of them. Passed through a filter, clipped and timed, superimposed on the backdrop of the city: great skyscrapers poking the starless, eyeless sky.

They're gone now, those days.

Gone but not forgotten.

Something inside him sighs.

He glowers at the hills down below, the straight-backed trees of lurid green, the branching streams that glisten in the sun. Picture perfect. Houses with multi-colored roofs poke up from between the shimmering canopies, rural shacks with clapboard walls swimming in a sea of leaves, like buoys in the middle of the ocean. Here he is now, stuck in a dull backwater village plopped down a hundred meters past the outer fringes of nowhere.

At any rate nowhere is somewhere. Maybe.

Nowhere is home now. Because home is just a shell and home doesn't exist anymore. Home is a pencil-drawn box with a triangle on top and a single apple tree to the side. Home used to be wild nights and callous kisses and now, _now_, home is the smell of fire and a hammer in his hand in front of a forge and the words Not good enough, try again, again, again.

No.

Not again.

Not good enough. Never good enough.

He's drowning in fury, in frustration, in birdsong and running water and sincere smiles and he has nothing to hold on to, no foothold to stick his toes into. Falling from nothingness into nothingness. Running away from whatever it is behind him. He's alive but not living; he doesn't know which way is up. The city, the village, it's all the same: names and voices and faces, always faces, too many of them to remember, none of them important enough to care about.

He doesn't know what he wants, what he needs. Not happiness. Happiness is subjective; only children wish for it. Happiness is the Santa Claus for adults: they believe in it until they catch delusion in disguise, at night, filling their socks with colorful dreams and bittersweet ambitions packaged in shiny, crackling tinfoil.

They unwrap happiness and find lies inside.

At least on Mother's Hill he can seize solitude in fistfuls, gulp it in without choking. Inhale it through a rolled paper bill like a drug, like crushed powder—no.

Don't.

No, those days have long been in the past. Dead, buried and abandoned, holed in a coffin of crumbling skeletons. Lodged in the dusty crevices of the mind and pressed into the underside like chewing gum. There, below the table, between bouncing knees, where the consciousness flits by but never lands. No use reopening old scars only to wait for them to heal again.

He takes a deep drag on the cigarette, keeps the smoke in his mouth. Already he can feel his lungs blackening, shriveling, hastening his death: come on, Grim Reaper. Do your worst. A taunt sent south of sunlit days. He exhales through the nose and the smoke streams out, ephemeral, rising up.

Smoke and music.

Everybody has a scar or two, behind the buttoned-up collar. Under flounced skirts and gold cuff links and the flapping black tie: secrets, dark ones, hidden pasts and dodged bullets. Little sticks carved into the plaster wall, like a prisoner, counting the days, the reckless forays beyond the boundaries: third chance at life, kitten. He flicks the cigarette by his feet and watches the embers pulse a dull red, smoke coiling upward, before crushing it with his shoe. Ashes underfoot. In the long run, dead people and cigarette butts have at least one thing in common.

The unlucky ones don't even get burned: their bodies lie on the asphalt and get eaten by the birds, their necks broken.

No names. Just bodies.

"Screw this," he yells to the emptiness. The blank echo of his voice bounces back to him, intersecting layers of anger washing down from naked air, lapping at the base of his neck like a reprieve, a forgiveness unsolicited. He hopes the roofs below house people inside, and that those people have heard him. Is he visible from up here? No, to them he must seem like an ant. A speck on the mountaintop, lost, breaking through the trees. Dust wanting attention, dust waving its arms, bobbing its head.

I'm here, look at me, watch me, and screw you.

Screw everyone.

No strings attached.

"Echoes just don't sound the same," she says, and he turns on his heel, a feral snarl rolling through his chest.

"Leave me alone."

His voice doesn't seem to reach her; the expression on her face is wistful, pensive, as though she's still asleep and doesn't know it. She's closer now, walking towards him, step, step, step. She treads on a twig and it snaps. Her eyes shoot past him, over his shoulder, gliding along the hazy skyline snaking in the distance. She might be seeing ghosts. Watching echoes, watching fluttering coldness from the morning's somnolent yawn. "They're like husks," she says.

"What?"

"Husks. The echoes, they're husks. Think of a glove: it looks like a hand, but the fingers are empty."

He laughs, harshly, the noise rasping in his throat. How poetic, how pathetic, how stupid, absurd, dimwitted. He shoves his fists into his pockets and the knuckles brush the flimsy fabric, worn soft by time and constant wear; there are holes in them. If he ever puts coins in there, they would fall right through the leg of his pants. Clink, clink, down on the ground, metallic.

She's smiling; he's not sure, but a corner of her mouth lifts and skews her face: a bland smile, a little brackish. The sun is up; it strikes her face flat and raises her features, the cracks around her lips and the moist gray-white chafing in between, the freckles on her nose, her large jug-ears, pink, slanted backward. She hums, and he finds the melody annoys him.

Smoke and music.

Sweat trickles down his nape, leaves a trail wetness that cools with the wind.

"Leave me alone," he says again, with less force this time.

"You can be surrounded by people and still be alone." Damn her. Damn her and her philosophizing, acting like she knows, like she cares, when all she wants is to knot him into a ball she can play with. Bounce him on the wall, or throw him far enough for the dogs to follow. The dogs first, then the wolves, pouncing on his weaknesses.

"Go away." The words come out rough, snappier than necessary.

"Is that what you really want?" She turns her glassy eyes on him, soft, probing, impossible to hold down, water in a drinking glass. "Do you really want to be alone?"

"Yes. Now leave."

A staggered laughter comes out from her, slithering close to the grass like a snake, like a stalking predator, coy and feminine but the wily kind, the kind that tends to raise its eyebrows and say Bad dog. "You don't own the mountain," she says.

"Neither do you." The fight drains out of him, he's had enough and he just wants to close his eyes and fall backward through time with his arms spread out and never hit the ground. Falling forever: now there's an idea. Blood rushing to your head, your eyes rolling around in their sockets, your tongue hanging out, the wind in your ears, and no one to see you. And then you pass out, but you keep falling. It's morbid, but it brings a sense of comfort, a freedom of sorts, if freedom means letting go. That must be how death feels.

No strings attached.

"You don't want to be alone," she says, facing the horizon again. "Nobody does, but not everyone's brave enough to admit it."

A growl rumbles deep in his throat. He's angry. No, _pissed off_—big time. "You know nothing about me." Images fly by behind his eyes, bodies, always bodies, always in the darkness, most of them alive, one of them dead. Eyes open and staring. Neck broken.

They loom behind him, no matter how much he tries to run away. They have long arms.

"Maybe I don't." She blinks, slowly, still wearing the half-smile that's sadder than a frown. "But maybe I do."

She doesn't. No one does.

He sighs, defeated, tired. Again. "Kinda presuming of you," he says. He squints and stares at sun sideways, from the edges of his sight; it stares back. "You don't want to be alone?"

The lifted side of her mouth sinks down, deepens, crumples the skin surrounding it. Small gesture, but significant: I don't know, it admits. "All I can say is that I'm not brave enough."

He shrugs. "No one is."

* * *

_a/n:_

_I have a very vague idea of where I'm taking this and I don't even know why I'm writing it but I am and I have no idea what I'm doing._

_It's definitely not M-rated, though. Nope. Definitely not. Nothing explicit here._


	2. Chapter One

**Chapter One**

I was young, back then.

So young, so fresh-faced and vibrant. Jejune, if you like. Brimming with faraway ideals, bouncing on my heels with pages in my head: broken hearts, broken families, broken heroes and happy endings.

Happy endings were mandatory. It didn't matter how jagged the edges, how bloodied the fingers, how utterly shattered the pieces; every person must have a happy ending, like a name or citizenship. Loose ends were tied, plot holes filled. The world was new and perfect, everyone loved everyone else.

Because I was young.

And with youth comes naiveté.

I was childish and ignorant, nestled between the sloping chapters of musky, dog-eared library books, tracing each line from behind my glasses. Cloistered among the verses of dead poets, in worlds that do not exist. Head buried in the sand, neck-deep in paragraphs of lies, oceans of metaphors, rivulets of truth dripping through fissures in fancy words.

The beats, the rhymes, the crunched syllables of poetic contractions (_O'er_, _ne'er_, _t'was_). The occasional limerick. Novellas, anonymous paperbacks, Proust's _In Search of Lost Time. _Anything fictional, just to avoid the truth outside my window.

Real life isn't real as it pretends to be.

So I escaped to the unreal and dawdled where I did not belong. My entire life was hinged on literature: inside the jacket of a novel, around the corner of a short story, within a footnote or under the epilogue. And for a while, I was happy.

Reality made sure things didn't stay that way.

I was young. I met him, and everything changed.

I fell in love.

In the silence of the library the clock's ticking is magnified, marking off time's harrowed steps on its endless journey to nowhere. Cracked ankles, a twisted staff, an age-bent figure trudging up the craggy rocks. And on the soft grass along the sidelines we stand, the audience, cheering. _Go on, Father Time, we're rooting for you_. That is, until we grow too old ourselves.

She sits across from me, shoulders hunched, elbows on the table.

On his favorite chair.

Her hands are wrapped around the reindeer-patterned coffee mug, her fingers raw from the cold. Mottled pink-and-white flesh around the square nails. Her mittens lie discarded by her elbow, dark green ones, lightly snow-dusted and smelling of home. I take a sip of my own drink, eyeing her over the rim without permission; she doesn't notice.

She doesn't notice much, these days.

A farmer to the bone. Blond and sturdy and tough. Like the girl from Ipanema: tall, tanned, lovely in her own way. But not young, not anymore. She used to be young, too.

She used to be beautiful.

But even angels fall from the sky sometimes. All it takes is a little tear, a little darkness, a little push. And they break.

"Making a lot of headway?" she asks, her head bowed over her cup.

"Haven't even started yet."

"Writer's block?"

"Yes."

She makes an ambiguous sound of assent and stares out the window. White outside, snow and somber skies, charcoal sticks of leafless trees. A black-and-white photograph brought to life.

Winter: the year's period, The End, a door swinging closed. The frosty blob of farewell, the epilogue, the final installment, a white handkerchief flapping in the wind, pinched between two gloved fingers: _hasta luego_, _auf Wiedersehen_, _au revoir_; winter is many things and lonely is one of them.

She's lonely, too.

Time has daubed its claim on her with a streak of gray on her temple, a delicate silver vein amid the golden curtain, a dash of wisdom to match the creases around her mouth. Used to be plump, that mouth. It's puckered now, pulled to an austere line that curls at the edges when she smiles.

Not young, not anymore.

Not old either: we're still in the audience, egging time on, our arthritic fists in the air, the fight lingering in our shoulders. Even now, years later, she still bears the sprightly pitch of her limbs, the focused glaze in her eyes that reflects one's own transparency: you fidget when she looks at you. _You_, the unseen backing behind the mirror, wondering what she reads, what vulgar thoughts dart just beneath your irises that can't quite meet hers.

Wondering how you appear to others.

How you appear to her.

So you palm your hair flat and tug on your sleeves and rearrange your face into a bright smile, but by then she's already seen what's inside you. I learned that over the years: Words are cheap. Novels are lies made to sound pretty. Those who see are those who don't speak in circles: line up the target and take a shot, straight as an arrow.

The real world is as real as it gets; no need to run around in a maze of explanations heaped over one another.

"But you already know what's going to happen." It takes me a while to understand what she means. Those eyes that hold mine right now are the same ones that held his, so many years ago. Made him wonder if, when, whether: the prospect of turning his sights outward, to the world, to whatever lay beyond the barbed-wire fence that was the future. Gave him the end of a rope and the chance to tug and see what he got.

Hope is lethal in large doses.

"That just makes it worse," I say. "We have the beginning and the end, but not what happens in between."

"That's what I'm here for." She winks at me and grins; her sagging cheeks bulge and lift her eyes into wrinkled crescents. Tucks her graying chin-length hair behind an ear. Did I say she used to be beautiful?

I was wrong. She still is.

* * *

He came into my life like a hurricane, like a summer storm: unexpected, abrupt, sweeping everything in its path, lobbing lives around and not checking where they landed. Kicked the door open and barreled in, settled himself in the middle of strangers clamoring to know him. Curiosity, you see. The whole town was intrigued by this young man from the city who never offered more than his name, a curt nod, and the occasional cigarette peeping halfway out of the pack.

Men with dark pasts are attractive, I'm told. (Manna: "But he's just so _mysterious!"_) People asked, they nudged, they prodded, they whipped out the _why are you here _and_ tell me about yourself _like a pair of aces, but he met them halfway with stony silence and a stonier glare, a double-faced Joker that said nothing, a wall, a dead end; in Manna's case, abrasive rebukes peppered with profanities.

He liked cursing.

I miss him. She misses him, too, although she doesn't say it.

One day I found him at the city square, stoop-shouldered and smoking, staring at the flyers tacked to the bulletin board. He cut an intimidating figure: tall, broad, hewn from the stone-flesh real men are made of, standing with his ankles crossed; the visor of his baseball cap cast a wide shadow over his face. When I approached him, his eyes traveled up and down once and never rested on me again.

"Hello," I said. My voice trembled: I was nervous for some reason; I remember twisting the front of my shirt so much my palms made damp spots in the creases. "I'm Mary."

"Gray," he said, and that was it.

No handshakes, no formal nods, no awkward shuffling of feet, no fumbling or throat-clearing or lint-picking. Not even a smile.

He smoked with the cigarette squeezed between a thumb and a forefinger, right at the orange end, which he would later explain was the filter. Sometimes he simply let the stick dangle out from a corner of his mouth, talking around it like a movie gangster, letting the ashes fall wherever they wanted to fall, the smoke to rise wherever it wanted to rise.

Silence stretched on, forward and up, unbroken by the lilting birds in the background, songs skimming the surface without touching, without diving. Time slowed to a painful crawl that it only moved when nudged forward by counting seconds.

_One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…_

I was about to turn and go when he said: "I hate this place."

That stopped me in my tracks and I glanced back at him. His eyes were on me, and he was scowling, I think. In hindsight, if I had ignored him then and stomped away, maybe things would have turned out differently. But would-haves and should-haves are for weeping souls drowning in ale, tears dripping down their noses, sobbing into their tankards.

Either way, I stayed. And I asked, "Why?"

"Why the fuck not?" He snorted. It was crude, like his voice, a rough hacking sound that brought to mind charred wood; it was the kind of laughter people make when the silence becomes so oppressive that their thoughts begin to whisper. "Grassy meadows, flowers and shit. It's a candy-cane pisshole out here. _Para-fucking-dise_. Do you people puke rainbows?" He stubbed his cigarette against the bulletin board, crushing it so thoroughly the ashes burned onto the corkboard and fluttered down to the pavement.

"Don't do that," I said.

"Don't tell me what to do."

Anger flashed within me; I felt my nostrils flare. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to slap that stupid hat off his head and tell him to pack his bags and scurry off from whatever dump he'd come from. But instead I said: "And why the fuck not?"

I surprised him with that; he didn't expect something so unsophisticated. Frankly, I surprised myself too. I wasn't one for swearing; I had never sworn in my life, not even once. But anger makes people do things they don't know they can, it makes you forget yourself and unclasp the locks keeping you in, and for another moment we stood staring at each other, caught unaware by the little dowdy librarian who had a streak of feistiness in her.

Who would have thought.

He started laughing. "You're all right, Mary." He flicked the cigarette butt into the trash bin and walked off to wherever he was supposed to go.

I watched his back getting smaller and smaller, until he turned a corner and disappeared completely. I didn't know what to make of him. He was jaded and unpolished, an ore with impurities, his edges undefined.

To most people he simply seemed angry.

I knew better.

He was sad.

Of course he wouldn't admit it, not then, not now, and not to me. But he was just so… sad. As if he was lost and going back home meant forging on until he found a ditch or a dry spot under the bridge.

And Mineral Town was that dry spot, so he hated it.

* * *

It's dark outside, and the stars are out. The lampposts pour yellow cones of light on the snow, on the wet pavement; it's cold.

"He hated winter," she says, blowing on her cup. Her third one today.

"He did." I twirled the pen between my fingers; for a fleeting second I let myself imagine it's a stick of cigarette, and that it's the middle of spring, and that I'm still young, and she's still young, and he's still here, and we're standing on the precipice of something big, something undefinable, the three of us with our eyes turned ahead, to the world out there, smiling with our complete sets of teeth and healthy joints and full heads of hair, the hems of our dreams swaying within reach, in a time when even the earth is young and time isn't gold and there are still things to laugh about.

But only for a second.

The past is our reflection in the mirror: blurred, reversed, it's there when we look but not when we don't.

So I stop looking, and the past disappears.

"Where do we start?" she asks.

I open my notebook and flip to the first page. Blank, like all the other pages. Blank from beginning to end.

I have a pen in my hand and I'm afraid to use it.

"At the beginning," I say. I poise the pen upon the paper, where it's meant to be, where it lays down ink in loops, where it follows the curves, the bars, the dashes and the dots, the tears and the laughter, the tangled mess we found ourselves in.

So she talks, and she tells the story of the three of us, from the beginning.

* * *

_a/n:_

_On swearing: I don't do it, not in real life. This is the first time I've written anything with the F-word in it. Hope I didn't offend anyone. Also: cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health._

_The story's really confusing me at this point. Still, thanks for reading!_


	3. sons and fathers

**sons and fathers**

He's tired.

It's in his bones, a lethargy neither solid nor liquid, not abstract, not concrete; something in between, stuck halfway in metamorphosis. Molten metal comes to mind. Paraffin. Heated languor in a pan, no, in a pot, where it can be stirred.

Sizzle, sizzle. _Fry my bones and eat it._

Exhaustion in the raw. Dribbling, dribbling down his chin. Trickling through his fingers.

The words _not good enough_ are ringing in his ears, phlegmy vowels and hoarse inflections, coiling and springing, with his grandfather's crumpled face looming over his shoulder, over the murky horizon, over the sky that unfurls at the edges; everywhere his grandfather's scowl and his grandfather's narrowed eyes and his grandfather's sunken cheeks. Not good enough, never good enough, try again, again, again.

(keep it together man shit don't lose it keep it together_)_

He recites it under his breath like a mantra, like a lifeline, because if he has to stay in this damned town for one more goddamned second he's gonna _lose_ it, Goddess help him, if he hears _not good enough _one more time his insides will explode.

One of these days.

She's still here, at least.

They stand under the streetlamp, huddled together, limbs inside the circle of spilling light. Foreshortened shadows pool at their feet. It's late, past midnight, perhaps, and no one else is up. This time of the night, you only have to step out of the house to convince yourself that despite the quiet, despite the peace, there are things lurking in the darkness, watching.

Overhead, clouds glow.

She's rubbing her hands up and down her arms, stamping her feet, although it's not cold.

Not that cold.

He pulls a cigarette from the pack using his teeth. He flicks the lighter, it sputters, sparks fly, dull red stars in miniature; impatiently he flicks again, and again, his thumb bearing down on the striker wheel, and finally it ignites: there's the flame, a trembling column rising up, tapered at the top. He cups a yellow-nailed hand around it and lights the cigarette still in his mouth. He sighs smoke.

Keep it together.

A chain-smoking slacker on the road to lung cancer. Two packs a day, going on three. Flirting with death, sliding into a semi-serious relationship. Next thing he knows he'll be buying a ring, and after that, a coffin.

"Those will be the death of you," she says, as if on cue, nodding at the stick. The whites of her eyes glow yellow in the light.

He shrugs. "The sooner the better."

An owl hoots, distant, ominous. She's nervous, he can tell, as though they're not supposed to be here; if they get caught—what? He almost laughs: they'll lock us up, he thinks, because we're talking in the middle of the night. How indecent, how scandalous, oh, how shocking. Uppity, self-righteous middle-aged bags of sagging tits. Wenches acting like virgins and shit. (In the middle of the night? Just the two of you? Oh dear, my word, but she's such a decent girl, oh, what will the others say?)

"It's late."

"I know."

"Gray—"

"I'm going crazy." His voice rises, breaks; he spits out the half-smoked fag and stomps on it. "Fuck this shit. Am I crazy?"

Don't lose it.

She smiles her sad smile, this little thing she does when she wants you to know it's okay, don't worry about it, it's gonna be all right, and says, "Who isn't?"

There is only so much patience in a person, only so much distance you could run before your legs give out from under you. Only so much sanity before it gets pushed too far and starts wandering too often, and when it comes home it's in pieces, one by one, and you'd have to glue it back together if you want to keep on going. Stick it together with chewing gum, a little spit, a little thread, finish it off with duct tape. Et voilà, good as new.

Sanity is overrated sometimes.

"If the world's gonna end tonight," he says, scratching at a corner of his mouth, "what will you do?"

"Jump off Mother's Hill." A pause. The owl hoots again. "I'd like to die on my own terms, thank you very much."

"Hell." _Smoke and music, heat and motion, sweaty bodies and low voices in his ear_. _Fingers tangled with hair._ "I'd get caught with my pants round my ankles."

"Eleventh hour sex," she says, smirking, tasting the word _sex _as if it's something forbidden, something moist and fleshy kept on the highest shelves, under lock and key; as if it's something hidden in a cellar to be visited in the middle of the night, on tiptoes, with a candle held aloft. Like a child sipping his first beer. Furtive, triumphant. "Making love while everything goes to hell."

"Ugh, no. I don't _make love_," he says, enclosing the words in air quotes bursting with disgust. He leans down, his face so close to hers, too close, and he smells the shampoo in her hair, the salty tang of sweat on her jaw, behind her ears, and he whispers, "I fuck."

She shivers; she covers it up by laughing. "Classy."

A moth flutters in the air, weaving around the lamppost. Bump, bump, bump; wings and antennae and sheer determination, bounding against the glass. Trying to reach the light, trying to get in, to break the barrier and bathe in whatever's dammed up inside: good luck with that, he thinks. Good luck to us.

"Gray," she says, "it's late."

"Let's run away."

A startled laughter: "What?" She's smiling, but her voice is little more than a whisper, squeezed out with uncertainty above and unease below. Fitting, if you ask him: if she shouts, if she calls bullshit loud enough for the sleeping hicks to hear, those little panes of glass he carries around inside his head may shatter. Those little panes of glass he calls hope.

Keep. It. Together.

Thoughts with clenched teeth and bulging tendons (fuck it) squeezing their eyes shut, lungs burning (let's run away), hands seared and bandaged, worming through fire (not good enough) until they disintegrate to cinders. What's wrong with him, goddammit?

"Let's get out of here. You and me." _The breathlessness of need. White teeth gleaming. Strobe lights pulsing, pulsing._

"Gray—"

"If I begged," he says, "and if I pleaded—"

_Bodies, always bodies, always in the darkness, most of them alive, one of them dead. Eyes open and staring. Neck broken._

(stop it man i said stop ah damn you stop it you sonofa—)

"—will you come with me?"

She chews on her lip, which she never does, and her eyes dart back and forth between his, torn between the unseen yes and the pulling no, yet unwilling to settle for the middle ground maybe. Trying to see if he's even half-serious.

He is.

There's the writing on the wall in the peripheries, in cursive, in dripping blood, and he can't bring himself to read it. But he knows what it says: No.

All that's missing is the disembodied hand floating in midair.

Say yes. Say yes. Please say yes. Can't leave without her. Embarrassing to think about, but there it is: he needs her, now more than ever. Why her, goddammit? She's nothing special. There's a gap on her front teeth and her ears are too big. Chapped lips, freckles, dry hair. Why her?

Don't lose it.

"I—" She takes a breath. "I don't know. It's too sudden. And—"

"Yeah, I knew you'd say that." He leans against the lamppost, his old self again, blank-faced, nonchalant. Come what may.

"I want to."

"But you can't."

"Gray—"

"Yeah, responsibilities. I get it."

Silently he shakes another cigarette out of the pack, tamps it, lights it. Is he addicted to this, to the smoke, to the nicotine crammed inside, to the blatant desecration of his own lungs? Blackening, shriveling, withering lungs. The ashes in his mouth say yes. He may be digging his own grave. Doesn't matter. Everyone's born to die; is it so wrong to hasten your own end? Run to the Grim Reaper, man, sprint, jog, crawl, whatever. Take a little detour if you want, we'll get there in the end. See you in hell.

Her eyes are drooping. She fights it. He knows she's sleepy, she's craving for her bed, warm and soft and inviting; she fights it to be with him, out here in the cold. Somehow he's touched by the gesture, though he's not sure what touched counts for these days.

"Hey," she says. "You know I love you, don't you?"

The owl hoots. Again. Somebody shoot the damned thing. He winces. "Let's not go there."

Love. What does that even mean? Lust, at least, is clear in its intentions: flesh, flesh, and more flesh. Anger breaks necks and bashes heads, charging through placating words, snapping bones between its teeth, steam coming out of the ears. But love—love builds homes for starving orphans, yet love also scopes you out and pulls the trigger. Love is a shared umbrella under the rain and a half-empty glass of watered-down beer you've downed in a gulp because she packed her bags and left you for the architect she met in a coffee shop. Love brings a good man to his knees, his ass up in the air, tears and snot running together down his face, begging, begging, please oh please come with me I beg of you let's get out of here you and me please—

Fuck that. Stick to lust.

"It's true. I do."

"Let's not go there," he says again.

"If love has a smell," she says, gazing at the stars, "it would smell like a book."

"Nah." Vaguely, he registers his toenails scraping against the inside of his socks. Time for a trim. One of these days. "It'd smell like sweat."

A smile tugs at a corner of her mouth but she tries to resist it, possibly afraid of offending him. He grins to show her it doesn't. "Sweat?" There's something in her voice, a blend of incredulity and amusement, that he finds endearing. Pah, _endearing. _Sexy is more like it.

"Love isn't as clean as you think." Smoke billows out of his mouth; they follow its journey up, twisting, curling, dissolving into nowhere. "Shake it up, dust it off, and you get good old hero worship. Idolatry. Love without the nitty-gritty."

"And this thing between us?"

A groan clambers up his throat and out through his mouth before he can catch it. "You mean air?" How pathetic. A weak stab at a joke. Man up, man up; you're not a kid anymore.

(hold your elbow higher boy grip the hammer tight i said higher you never learn do you no that's not good enough do it again again again)

"Yeah." She chuckles lamely. "Air."

"Hey—"

"It's late." She's retreated again, inside her own consciousness, to the place she runs to whenever she's had enough of the world and its people. Inert, meditative. Eyes unfocused. "The inn's locked by now, you know. Where will you sleep?"

"I have a key. But listen—"

"Go." She gives him a little push. "Any later and they'd catch you sneaking in."

So he turns and jogs away, into the darkness, away from the solitary lamppost with her underneath, watching with eyes that focus inward, seeing herself, seeing him, seeing nothing.

* * *

_a/n:_

_Sons and Fathers doesn't make much sense as a title, considering Saibara is Gray's grandfather, but for some reason Grandsons and Grandfathers doesn't have the same ring to it._

_Again: cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health._

_Thanks for reading!_


	4. Chapter Two

**Chapter Two**

It's snowing.

The flakes drift down softly, brushing earth with muted fingers, sweet as a maiden's first kiss. They waft on frigid wings, dusting the tops of trees and roof gutters, window awnings and squared hedges; they pile in mounds and heaps, watered-down ice spilled on the pavement. Earth weeps, its tears swirling from cheerless clouds, from the dismal sky, from winter's trembling hands blue with the cold. Bonneted heads creep along, frosted white all of them.

Frosted white shoulders and frosted white faces, heads down, hands in pockets, nodding at the people they pass by. Plumes of white in front of their mouths.

Hey, how are you doing, have a nice day.

Everything is drowning in ice, even the people.

I am drowning in something else: memories, old ones, ones that have shaped the present, the ones that time itself has left behind. Dropped in the wake like pebbles to be picked up and collected, stored in a chest under the bed, or lined up on a windowsill as fickle companions on winter days. They are dangerous things to drown in. You never know when you're out.

There is no surface to them. No way up, no way down. Only forwards, toward the future, over the edge of the earth, plummeting into the gaping maw.

I am drowning.

…forgive me. An old woman has many regrets, and I am no exception. But when do we stop growing up and start growing old?

We are lobbed into the snow, tested to see if we sink or we swim.

I think we're sinking.

The view from my window is cut into four, like a puzzle solved, with the curtains hanging limp around it. My breath fogs the glass when I breathe. On snowy days I can't go out; my joints hurt too much. If I listen carefully, I can hear them creaking.

In movies, everything can be healed by a kiss, a cuddle, a tender fingertip running along the jaw. A little sacrifice that doesn't hurt, a silent crying fit in the rain, a flick of the wand and there you go: your life's okay again, everything's back to normal.

In real life, you just grow older.

Older, but not always wiser.

On my desk is a sheet of paper with one word in it: everlasting. Must have written it without thinking. Funny, if you ask me. Whatever the three us once had, it certainly wasn't everlasting. It's a pretty word, though: the dainty e that looks like a backwards three, joined with the v by a loop, a holy matrimony, the languid hiss that follows. But it ends with a sting.

Everything seems to end with a sting if you don't keep your guard up.

It's cold and I'm shivering. I think I'm not shivering from the cold.

Do you know what loneliness feels like?

Maybe, sometime in the past, you've visited a schoolyard on a cheerful Saturday afternoon and stared at the unmoving swings and unused slides and heard the silence ringing with the absence of children's laughter, children who weren't there.

That's loneliness.

Or maybe you've woken up in the middle of the night, gasping and covered in sweat, reeling from the shapeless thing chasing you in dreams, and you pawed along the bed in search of your mother's hand and you found there was no one with you.

That's loneliness.

Perhaps you yelled atop a mountain and the echo that came back wasn't your voice.

That's loneliness.

It could be that you stared at an old photograph of a person, someone you once knew, smiling at the camera with their front teeth bared, and you realized that they didn't smile like that anymore.

That's loneliness.

The hopeful glances toward the window, waiting to catch the hurrying streak of a blue baseball cap, or the merry tinkling of the door chimes, or the squeak of a floorboard under heavy steps, or a curt greeting and the smell of Lucky Strikes, and you don't even know whether you're hoping or simply remembering, so the past and the future are coiled up in your mind and you don't notice when the tears start falling.

That's loneliness, too.

The clock says one. Three more hours before she comes by. Three more hours remembering. It's not such a fun thing, reminiscing. Sometimes you stumble upon a pleasant memory that warms your old bones and makes you think Ah, those were the days, but every now and then you dig up skeletons that are best left buried, and the worst part is that you recognize their faces.

Take a hammer to the coffin's nail, and hit it for good.

I mostly live here now, these days. Upstairs, in the library, always upstairs, with my father's books and the spiders on the ceiling. I don't like it downstairs. Not because of the things there, mind, but because of the things that aren't there.

I'll tell you which ones.

There is no man downstairs who sits at the farthest corner of the table, his legs crossed, his fingers yellow. There is no book lying open before the man who isn't there, a well-thumbed copy of Dostoevsky's _Demons_, perhaps, or a simple story by D.H. Lawrence, which he doesn't grimace at because the book isn't there and the man isn't there and they will not be there today, nor tomorrow, nor the day after that.

No trace of cigarettes and smoke and fire and metal, no gruff hahs when he comes across an interesting passage, no gagging sounds when the lovers promise devotion under the winking stars.

No more questions to be asked because he's not there. No more books to suggest. There's no shifting when his back grows stiff, no tapping knuckles on the table, no licked fingers turning the pages, no subtle coughs and _Damn, I need a smoke_.

Because he isn't there.

That's loneliness, too.

Loneliness is the bone-white remains of love in the years that follow happily ever after. When the lilies have wilted and the church bells split, the pews emptied of mourning faces, the prayers said, the dirt hole filled, the hats tipped: when everything else has wasted away, loneliness stays.

* * *

I thought the meeting at the square would be our last. I was wrong.

He visited the library one day, when the sun grazed the earth at a lofty angle and the trees were still. A Thursday, wide-eyed Thursday, sleepily yawning, half in bed. Gray walked in with a smug grin on his face and the ever-present Lucky between loose lips, his cap tilted down and his collar askew. He wiped his face on a sleeve and smudged soot on his cheek: Charcoal-colored soot from the furnace smeared on his clothes, the smell of fire burning. There was something about him that day—call it intuition if you will—an empty, nebulous shape that had crept up close when his back was turned and dragged him down. And ebb and flow of darkness, of gloom, soft, rustling, like the opening and closing of butterfly wings. Like prehensile fingers on ivory keys, pressing down three at a time.

A steel rod called expectations, climbing up every time you look. Dangerous stuff: you fail to meet them most of the time. They have a habit of reminding you of the things you can't do, and of the fact that you're only human, and a pathetic one. A bar raised too high, a finish line drawn too far. You come up short, you blame yourself. Beat yourself up. They follow you around like your own shadow, mauve and tender and clean-cut, lengthening when the sun sets, when you're alone and trying to sleep, and they start whispering: You failed, you failed. Not good enough.

"So, Mary," he said. It was close to a drawl. I liked the way he said my name then; he rolled the r and stretched the a so much he sounded mocking, or pleading, I don't know. Possibly both. Pleading for an ear, an unsympathetic, non-judgmental ear, just a plain ear in thick glasses and knee socks willing to listen in timid silence. Mocking, too: Don't you have anything better to do?

Framed by the open doorway, outlined by the bruised spring sunshine, he took in the room and the things in it: the books, the tables, me. Steps going up. An unlit fluorescent tube on the ceiling. He stared at the humble card on my desk and said: "Librarian, huh?"

I pointed to the No Smoking sign by the door, still shiny, corners still rounded. He stared at it as if it were a mutant, something he had never seen before, and shrugged. "What the hell," he said. The windows were open, and the half-smoked cigarette sailed through in a neat arc.

"Hello," I said.

He paused, surprised. "Bit slow, aren't we?"

"Sorry. I didn't expect you to—"

"Come here? Well, here I am." He sauntered over to the bookshelves, boots thudding on the floor. Rows and rows of dusty books offered their spines for inspection: leather-bound books, hardcover books, books with oily thumbprints on the margins, books with torn pages and highlighted passages and coffee stains, books with secrets hidden inside, looped like a nest of snakes; lift the cover and let them out, up, into the air, an entire world set free.

I loved those books. I loved setting them free.

And inspect them he did, thrusting his nose towards them, eyes narrowed, with perhaps a bit of contempt, and a thin slice of curiosity.

"Hey, librarian," he said. "Suggestions?"

Oh, you cannot imagine how many I had. There's Hemmingway, and Orwell, and Kafka and Keats and Poe and Nabokov, and Kerouac for an edge, and Austen for something Victorian. So many authors, so many novels I was dying to share. Something fast-paced, something in active voice, with action and life-and-death decisions, possibly a wartime love story thrown in. And what did I pick?

I handed him a battered copy of _Jane Eyre_.

He looked at it suspiciously, his nose a little wrinkled, and glanced at me. I suppose he had reservations towards books titled after women, especially a woman named Jane.

"Okay." He took it—that was a miracle in itself—and peered under the cover, rifled the pages, glanced at the synopsis at the back. He glanced at me again, as a final question, seeking affirmation, a glance that says Are you sure about this, or Do I really look like that kind of person to you. A dubious, dubious glance, one that almost had me laughing. "This one, then?"

"Yes."

He squared his shoulders: Challenge accepted. Just then, something flickered in his eyes. Dramatic, I know, but how else could I say it? He pulled out a chair and started reading.

I counted to ten, taking my time; with his back to me I couldn't see his face, and even if he were facing me I still couldn't anyway: that cap, you see. It was some sort of protection, or a talisman, an extra coating of repellent: A smooth, hard shell mothering whatever he was hiding. Like a stuffed elephant. Comfort toys for adults. I had my glasses, he had his cap.

Soon I reached ten. He was still reading. Hunched over the book, with his arms on the table. He meant business. This was something he could do.

Twenty, thirty, forty. Still reading.

Why he came to the library of all places was a mystery to me. He was tired: I read it in the slope of his shoulders, the tightness of his eyes. He was hacking his way through a maze closing in, and in me he found a fellow prisoner trying to get out. But my escape came in the form of fiction, which is safer than amorphous anger: I believe that was what brought us together, the need to withdraw from life's games, or races, or long treks, or whatever metaphor fits best. Sometimes you just get tired. Sometimes you want nothing more than to put your feet up and stretch and take a nap. A quick time-out. Hands fashioned into a T: Just a sec, I need to rest, give me a break.

Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine. Still reading.

I wondered how the world appeared to him. Was it clear, cold, in sharp focus? Zoomed in on the details: the stitches on a skirt hem coming off crimpled, the stringy network of vines under a leaf, the cracked valleys of skin on one's palm? Or was it far-off, hazy, a homogenous soup of blended senses, perhaps tinted with red at the edges?

I do not know what I was to him. A distraction, maybe. A harmless pastime, something to poke with a stick: an animal behind bars. An experiment. A talking dream with a lumpy braid and soda-bottom glasses, flighty and absent-minded but still sensible. A mentor. Perhaps a pet.

Or a friend.

I didn't know then and I don't know now.

"Closing time," I said, after—a few minutes? Hours? Days?—some time. The words felt heavy, sluggish, cottony somehow. I wanted him to stay, right there on the farthest corner of the table, and read _Jane Eyre_ forever.

But one forever's not enough, it ends, even forevers get old, it eventually folds up and goes to sleep, and another one picks up where the first left off. Generations of forever, rolling down the mountain, snowballing, round and round and round, reviving the forgotten, the echoes, the damned: the things that didn't last.

He folded a corner of the page, closed the book with a snap, and shoved it back on the shelf. His movements had a mechanical quality, a hard efficiency. Brisk, curt, to the point. Straight to business. No time for dilly-dally.

On his way out he stopped by my desk, tapping his fingers on the varnished surface. "Slow day?"

"Every day's a slow day."

"But you don't close up for good."

"I have little panes of glass in my head I call hope," I said, teasing. "When one breaks, I make another one. That way I don't run out of hope."

His face twisted into something halfway between confusion and wry amusement, the cogs in his head turning, weighing me and my words, testing the heft, sorting: Is she serious? Is she joking? Is she yanking on my leash, trying to see if I'd bite?

Finally he laughed. Not too loudly, although he wasn't trying to be subtle, either. "You're weird," he said. "See you, weirdo."

And he smiled. It was the first real smile he ever gave me.

He finished _Jane Eyre_ in the next three days.

* * *

The snow has stopped.

"Hey," she says, shaking flakes from her hair. "Something wrong?"

"No." I wipe a wayward tear that somehow found its way out of the coffin. More nails. I need more nails on that particular coffin. "No. Everything's fine."

* * *

_a/n:_

_I'm sorry I failed to update for such a long while._

_This always happens. Always. I write something on a whim and I'm not even halfway through when I start running out of steam. So sorry._

_Also I'm trying (and mostly failing) to write some original stuff. ...Allow me to emphasize the words "trying (and mostly failing)" once more._


	5. snap he goes

**snap he goes**

Tonight the sky hangs low.

A sky that watches, eavesdrops, leans down and strains its ear, belly brushing the mountains: I see you, it says, I hear you, you can't hide from me. A velvet mantle spread overhead, solidified smoke, silent as shadows, borderless and centerless. Like the underside of some great beast: heaving, breathing; if he listens closely he can hear it thinking. Almost alive, but not quite.

He wants to reach out and poke a hole in the sky's stomach, see if it has intestines. Guts, the gory details hidden inside, blood, the meaty stuff. A heart of gold, maybe. A rain reservoir. Or a secret alcove where all lost things end up.

One of these days the sky will fall and smother those who still breathe. The nosy son of a bitch.

She's almost alive, too. Half-dead, he thinks of her, what with her hodgepodge pastiche skin and her dimming eyes, her hardened shell; her wakeful sleepwalking through the day; the dreams eddying around reality, funneling down the drain. Would it be more optimistic—or less pessimistic—if he thinks of her as half-alive? As though she's water in a drinking glass, being swirled around. No, not water, he's thinking of beer.

She may as well be.

They lie together on the grass, spread-eagled both of them, thinking of sad things, of far-off things, in the distant land called the past, with the song of the crickets rising all around them.

Problem is, the past is a different country for everyone, a different world, sharing bits and pieces: the same city, the same encounter, the same scape. You can get lost in your own past, where everything's familiar but blurred, or in someone else's, where the rules have changed, and the maps have been sold out, and the signposts aren't where you expect them to be and there's no way to find the route back home.

Flag a goddamned cab or jack a bike, he thinks. Or use your legs and run.

Not good enough.

She's in one of those moods again, those bouts of quiet contemplation. The solemn minutes of glassy-eyed silence, nose pressed against the fragile tapestry of memories, feeling for bulges and snipping. Zipped up to the neck. Like a cocoon, split in two, present and absent at the same time. A moiety: Ooh, how fancy.

How fucking highbrow.

Keep it together, dipshit.

Above them, the stars are many and they are mocking: No, we don't grant wishes, we don't care about you, get a life, we twinkle and that's it. Up there on the dusky sky they wink, looking down on those who look up. She's watching them, too. Their light glistens in her eyes.

He feels the usual vertigo of someone too close to earth—the sudden, irrational fear of falling up, into the black glittering sky, into the endless space. No air up there. He grips the grass under him, just to reassure himself that gravity still works.

He wonders if she feels the same thing. He wonders if she feels anything.

"What are you thinking?" he says. What he wants to say is Come here. Come back. There's no place for you there, wherever your mind's gone to, the past is not a safe place—

(please help me forget for just one night, you'll help me, won't you?)

—and that's why we leave it for the future, where it's not safe either, only safer. But he doesn't say any of this. He doesn't say much of anything most of the time; words come out wrong. Wrangled, somehow, as if forced out, spat out with the help of a pat on the back. Or a Heimlich Maneuver, for swallowed thoughts.

Anyway she's growing more and more despondent these days; she doesn't listen too hard, and most of the words fly over her head.

"Have you ever wanted to come back," she says, "to the city?" In the darkness her eyes gleam. Predatory, like those of a cat's, crouched in the shadows; minus the intent to kill. Clouds pass over the moon; the gleam vanishes.

"Hell yes." He inhales the nighttime air, the nighttime silence. The cold burns his nose. "Anything but this pisshole of a hicktown."

"But you can't."

"You know why, babe."

Grass tickles his nape, his ears. He should get up, dust himself, and walk away. But he can't. Too late for that.

In the city, the nights were colorful, and loud: neon signs, booming speakers, lipsticked sluts waving from the streets, lifting their nyloned legs. Bar wenches looking for horny, philandering men to bed them; and horny, philandering men looking for bar wenches to bed. Homeless people in oversized coats and sour-smelling blankets—_spare change, please?—_usually with bone-thin mutts curled up in their laps. Crowds of people, wasted, high, muttering gibberish, puking on the sidewalk: See you tomorrow, Call me, Can you drive? A network of lives, crossing at a single point, never meeting again. Everything blended into white noise.

He doesn't lurk in any of these. He lurks in the face of a man, a stranger, really, who is now dead.

He dreams of that man; he stands out from the rest of the memories. The contorted face, the unseeing eyes, the snap, the crack, the life seeping out. He dreams of the man's daughter, her hair, the color of her voice: blue, like a lifeless hand, a withered blue awash with gray, watercolor brush strokes, the color of fidelity growing old.

In his dreams, they do not have names. Only faces, and voices.

(No strings attached.)

Melodic, sopoforic voices, indelible thumbprints soaked in ink, at the corner of life's contract. Too bad no one ever reads the fine print.

And somewhere, in the midst of the sleep-voices, a blackened plea ringing: Help me forget, just one night. And, afterwards: Take me away.

He did help her forget, for many, many nights. In his apartment. Ashtrays, buzzing fluorescent tubes, peeling wallpapers. Tangled ankles and swollen mouths in the pasty light of dawn. The mechanical, repetitive grinding, the passionlessness—fuck it, be honest, there was passion there, burning under the sheets, licking along the drooping mattress; it took him by surprise, and that's why he stuck with her, against his own rules. ("Well, that was new.")

No names exchanged.

No strings attached.

Damn it, you little rule breaker, you.

Oh, he helped her forget, all right, but he didn't take her away: no, he doesn't work that way, he ran out on his own, scampered west, where the city's stone teeth open up into something greener. Something sweeter, more fragrant, so much less cracked, where his grandfather stood waiting in the smoke of the goddamned forge.

It didn't matter, in the end. She's here; she's found her way to him, unintentionally. Stepped on his trail and got her ankle twisted in it, got dragged with the force propelling him.

And he dreams of her more and more, in stark black-and-white dreams of cold evenings and clustered sheets, of helping her forget. Sometimes he dreams in red, and whenever he does he wakes up covered in sweat and aching, or wishing he's a child again.

"Do you ever think about—"

"No."

"It wasn't your fault." She shifts, her cat-eyes turn to him: _It's okay, _the stare says,_ don't worry about, it's gonna be all right. _ "Don't blame yourself."

"I fucking killed him." In the moonlight she winces; in the darkness the lifeless face looms, the wide eyes, the lolling head, the sickening snap. (neon signs blinking and humming, _greenpurplebluegreenpurpleblue_, sidewalk bathing in artificial color, the face all green, all green, purple, blue and red, red, _redredredred_) "Broke the goddamned stick of a dick he has for a neck."

Broke it, cracked it in two. Like a pencil.

_Snap._

(stop it man i said stop ah damn you stop it you sonofa—)

"And?" she says, intrigued, fascinated, completely unfazed. As though they're talking about the weather. As if the potbellied cops in the goddamned city aren't looking for him with their lecherous mustaches and fancy flashlights and donut-crumbed fingers, as if he's not a fucking murderer, as if they're nothing but a happy young couple stargazing in a grassy flower field looking forward to the nuptial future without a dead body in their wake.

No names, just bodies.

One of them dead.

"He was your father!" His voice echoes around them, a parody of distress: _father, father, ather, ther_. Like a waterlogged voice calling out for help, from another world. From the bottom of the sea.

He's sitting up now, blunt nails digging into his palms. The nighttime air rushes into his lungs, then out, in, out. Something throbs in his temple. God, let him explode. Let it be his death. Life is overrated, life is too much burden and too little happiness, too little freedom, too many dead-end mistakes and one-way streets. What's the point of living if you spend your life running away, throwing furtive looks over your shoulder, locking doors and crossing borders?

He blames her for it.

If he never met her, if he never—

Never what, fell in love? _Please_. What a heap of fresh, steaming, sappy bullshit. Want some rose petals with that? Red, the reddest ones, or you'll upset the lady. How about a diamond ring, set in platinum gold, for her dainty finger? Never mind that you'll go broke and never eat a fucking meal again, so long as the wife gets her pretty, sparkly jewelry she has no use for but show to other women: Look, isn't it just gorgeous, yes, he bought it for me, isn't he just perfect?

(shit don't lose it man keep it together)

She sits up, too, calmly, resting her chin on her knees. What he wants is to shake her, show her how much the past haunts him; unbutton the sooty jacket and show her the scars, the razor-edge ripples in his skin; yank the sleeves up and show the slashes on his arms and say, Look, see, I'm not invulnerable. Show her how much guilt he can take, because really, he's human, too, he has a conscience and he feels remorse and he has a moral code and shit, and there's a limit to the secrets on his shoulders: the last straw has been a long time coming, but it's coming, and it's coming soon.

And what happens when the camel's back breaks?

What a fucking weak-kneed camel. Coward. You can take more than that.

She deserves better.

"I killed your father," he says again, calmer now. "I killed a man."

She sweeps her hair away from her neck with a listless hand. "Who hasn't?"

"Not funny, Claire."

"I killed my mother," she says, blank-faced. "Not literally, of course. But there's a way to kill without the victims ending up dead. And there are things worse than death, you know."

He doesn't answer.

"Death isn't always the ultimate sacrifice. Sometimes it's biting your tongue and quietly loving someone, even if that person's a complete asshole and the only thing he'll do is hurt you."

Still he doesn't answer. He knows she means her father, but he can think of someone else who fits the bill.

"She knew everything."

_Please help me forget, for just one night. You'll help me, won't you? _"Everything?"

She sighs, scoots closer to him, leans her head on his shoulder. She smells of grass and morning dew, and talcum powder: damp and cakey at the same time, like a frosted cupcake. "What my father was doing to me," she says. "She knew it, and every day it killed her. She wanted to help me, you know."

Yes, he knows that part. She told him the same thing back then, on one of their meetings, when they were lying idle in bed on a rainy evening, him smoking pack after pack, her talking: how prosaic, when put that way. Anyway everything's prosaic in hindsight, when the present's gray spotlight shines on the past and uncovers secrets dusted over, the boxes of unused things, the skeletons in closets: Cobwebs between emaciated ribs. Cobwebs in the eyeholes. _Oh, a skeleton. Old news. Yawn. _

Every little drama turns bleak when looked back on.

…Even murder?

Even a broken neck?

(stop it you sonofa—)

Snap.

"And then?" he says.

"And then nothing." Her hand, cool and thick-wristed, creeps along his stomach, under his shirt. Spidery fingers, spidery fingers crawling up and down, feather-light, exploring. He lets her. "What could she do? Go to the cops? No one would believe her. A flighty housewife with a schizophrenic history. Even I wouldn't."

Now her face is up against his cheek; he feels her breath on his ear, so warm, and she starts planting little kisses, innocent ones, along his jaw. Her liquid voice flows, rich and low, enticing: like melted chocolate, like red wine, like sex itself. He wants to say something, but he can't.

"She loved him, you know," she continues. "She loved that dirty bastard. But she hated him, too. Every night she'd hold me and tell me she's so sorry, and it's going to be over soon. Turns out she's right: it _was_ over soon, for her."

"Claire—"

"Don't say you're sorry. Don't say it wasn't my fault." Her fingers linger on his belt buckle. A hot, wet sensation on his neck: that's her tongue, he thinks; his breath hitches. "She killed herself, and it was my fault." There's a different kind of wetness there, and with a horror he realizes she's crying. Tears. Salty tears, bitter tears, but she doesn't stop her ministrations. "I could've done something, I don't know what, but I could've and I didn't."

"I'm—"

She grabs his face with both hands and kisses him once, on the mouth. "Help me forget again," she says. "Help me forget tonight."

Dumbly he nods.

And so he helps her forget again. And again. And again.

She forgets, but he doesn't.

* * *

_a/n:_

_It's been a rough few days, and even though it sounds like an excuse, it's really not. Nope. Not at at all. ;D_

_There was a tropical storm here that lasted four, five days. The street outside our house was instantly turned into a public swimming pool—a muddy public swimming pool—because the rain just won't let up._

_On the upside, we had a week-long vacation, which I spent mostly sleeping._

_Oh, and as for the story: I have no idea what I'm doing. It's taking shape, I think, but it's still blurry._

_Thanks for reading! :D_


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